________________________________________________
_ For some time I stood tottering on the mound regardless of my
safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had
thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had
not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated
this startling vision of unfamiliar things. I had expected to see
Sheen in ruins--I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of
another planet.
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of
men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I
felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly
confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations
of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew
quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of
dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an
animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be
as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire
of man had passed away.
But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my
dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the
direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch
of garden ground unburied. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-
deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the
weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet
high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my
feet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a
corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble
into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple
of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I
secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through
scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking through an
avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more
food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of
this accursed unearthly region of the pit.
Some way farther, in a grassy place, was a group of mushrooms which
also I devoured, and then I came upon a brown sheet of flowing shallow
water, where meadows used to be. These fragments of nourishment served
only to whet my hunger. At first I was surprised at this flood in a
hot, dry summer, but afterwards I discovered that it was caused by the
tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary
growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of
unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the
water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water
fronds speedily choked both those rivers.
At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a
tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in
a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and
Twickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the
ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red
swamp, whose margin I explored, and much of the desolation the
Martians had caused was concealed.
In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had
spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of
certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of
natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting
power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe
struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The
fronds became bleached, and then shrivelled and brittle. They broke
off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early
growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.
My first act on coming to this water was, of course, to slake my
thirst. I drank a great deal of it and, moved by an impulse, gnawed
some fronds of red weed; but they were watery, and had a sickly,
metallic taste. I found the water was sufficiently shallow for me to
wade securely, although the red weed impeded my feet a little; but the
flood evidently got deeper towards the river, and I turned back to
Mortlake. I managed to make out the road by means of occasional ruins
of its villas and fences and lamps, and so presently I got out of this
spate and made my way to the hill going up towards Roehampton and came
out on Putney Common.
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the
wreckage of the familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation
of a cyclone, and in a few score yards I would come upon perfectly
undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly drawn and doors
closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if
their inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the
tall trees along the lane were free from the red creeper. I hunted
for food among the trees, finding nothing, and I also raided a couple
of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and ransacked.
I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in
my enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians.
I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried
circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I
had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but skeletons, picked
clean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones
of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I
gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from
them.
After sunset I struggled on along the road towards Putney, where I
think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some reason. And in the
garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon
Putney and the river. The aspect of the place in the dusk was
singularly desolate: blackened trees, blackened, desolate ruins, and
down the hill the sheets of the flooded river, red-tinged with the
weed. And over all--silence. It filled me with indescribable terror
to think how swiftly that desolating change had come.
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence,
and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the
top of Putney Hill I came upon another skeleton, with the arms
dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body. As I
proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of
mankind was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished
in this part of the world. The Martians, I thought, had gone on and
left the country desolated, seeking food elsewhere. Perhaps even now
they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they had gone
northward. _
Read next: BOOK 2 - THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS: CHAPTER 7 - THE MAN ON PUTNEY HILL
Read previous: BOOK 2 - THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS: CHAPTER 5 - THE STILLNESS
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